What gets me is that initial pause. The bird knows this song. He knows when the drum comes in. Being able to anticipate musical rhythm is a form of intelligence very few species have, and this is the most remarkable example of it I’ve ever seen in a bird. The cockatoo knew to wait for the drums.
do people on tumblr like. realize that friendships arent therapy
this is how yall end up going around calling every ex-friend your abuser. its nice for your friends to be able to drop everything for you when youre having a bad time, but its literally NOT mandatory. your friends should not have to ignore their own problems to fix yours. get some therapy.
as a friend, you are allowed to say “i would really love to help you right now, but i cant push back my own issues to help you. im going through my own problems right now, and thats what i need to focus on”. it is NOT selfish. you arent going to be of any help to the people you care about if youre in bad shape and not taking care of yourself. its only going to make you worse for wear.
Do you all know how much meatt a grown deer can yield?
A mature buck can yield around 60lb of meat.
I looked up some venison recipes. Each recipe asked for about one lb of venison for four servings.
That’s a good 2 weeks of dinners feeding a family of four. From just one buck. From just one morning out in the woods. If you go to Walmart, you can buy a one lb tray of groound beef for
$4.48, leaving you paying almost $270 for the same amount of meat that the buck yields.
I know people who ONLY eat things they hunt themselves or that they’ve traded with other hunters and the amount of money they save on food is genuinely shocking. That money they save helps them pay their bills, buy toys for their kids, etc. The meat they don’t need helps other people feed their own families and save on food bills. Those people appreciate the environment and wild animals more than any militant vegan living in the city or suburbs because they have firsthand experience with their ecosystems. They understand how animals work, how they live, what they feel. They respect that, and treat those animals with respect by making sure they don’t go to waste.
Hunting is important.
Also anyone in conservation will tell you hunters are some of the BIGGEST contributors to environmental protection. There’s this idea that hunters destroy the environment but many ARE environmentalists- and like OIP said they understand the area better than most people!
The fact that this is an important source of protein is so SO important but also hunters aren’t “the bad guys” for conservation efforts and I wish people realized that!
To add to this, I’m currently studying wildlife conservation in college.
Part of one of my courses is working at least 3hrs at a deer check station. Basically, hunters bring their deer in (sometimes just the head, sometimes the whole deer) and we age it, measure the antlers, weigh it (if possible), and ask the hunter to take a quick survey about what other species they’ve seen, and whether or not these numbers have increased in the past year. data collection like this is extremely important for managing wildlife populations, in some areas the deer check stations check for chronic wasting disease.
There’s a big difference between trophy hunters and food hunters.
So the President wants to reopen the economy? Fine, show me the plan, let’s see it. I want to know how I’m supposed to coordinate reopening New York with Albany, or Buffalo. How do I coordinate reopening New York with Texas, or New Jersey? The federal government took no active part in coordinating shutting down the states economy, so if they want to take control of reopening the whole thing, then they need to show the governors of every state a detailed plan on how they are supposed to do that, while ensuring the safety of the citizens.
The USPS is about to declare bankruptcy. It’s at the center of the longstanding plans for disaster recover and has been since the Cold War. It’s the only institution that could (for example) deliver covid meds to every home in America in one day.
The proximate cause of the post office’s bankruptcy is the pandemic, but that is merely the finishing blow. The USPS was murdered in 2006, when Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.
The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.
The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.
The USPS’s murder is straight out of the neoliberal playbook: “1 Defund, 2 claim crisis, 3 call for privatizatization, 4 profit!”
As Lambert Strether points out, it was a bipartisan act of murder, cosponored by the “centrist” Democrat Henry Waxman.
Killing the USPS looms large in the Trump admin’s (nonmetaphorical, actual) privatization playbook, “Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations”:
The proposals are for USPS to become a Wework clone or franchisee, but not to become a publicly owned bank - a common line of business for other nations’ postal services, natural based on the amounts of cash they handle.
The USPS is the nation’s second largest employer of veterans, with 630,000 employees. Trump is about to allow it to collapse so that UPS, Fedex and other private firms can skim off the most profitable parts of its business and leave rural Americans totally isolated.
The loss of the USPS would mean the loss of the last truly universal federal program in America and would unduly hammer the people whom Trump claims to love – veterans and rural voters.
I read a diary at Daily Kos which suggested that if half the households in America bought 2 sheets of Forever Stamps, for about 16 bucks, it would provide enough funding to keep the USPS alive.
How fucked up is this? We’re trying to save the fucking Postal Service, which is in the fucking CONSTITUTION, from Republican sabatoge.
There is no such thing as a moderate, or patriotic, Republican. They are anti-American Fascists.
don’t miss the fact that this is coinciding exactly with the push to increase mail-in voting, which would seriously jeopardize Trump’s reelection. you can’t have mail-in ballots if there’s no postal service, right?
Americans, please text USPS to 50409 and ResistBot will send a message to your senators and congressperson telling them to save the Post Office.
i did it yesterday and it couldn’t have been easier. my senators are both pieces of shit, but that doesn’t mean i’m not going to give them an earful about this.
Texting resistbot was SUPER easy, and I got an email reply from my senator’s office today confirming my email went through. Please do at least that!
Americans, you know we need the Postal Service, right? For a whole lot of reasons. I’ve talked about this before, how the Republican party wants to get rid of it. Right now, they are really threatening to do it. You need to be loud and angry at your reps right now, ESPECIALLY if they are Republican.
The Postal Service is the most popular government service. It’s in the Constitution. It’s the only service that will deliver (has to deliver) to anywhere in the U.S. Even rural areas. And they do not charge more for it like FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. They deliver your Amazon packages. They are also the only thing keeping FedEx, UPS, DHL, and the others from charging you *whatever the hell they want* to deliver your packages.
They also, and this is not a coincidence, deliver ballots so you can vote by mail. Voting by mail is now a serious issue for both fairness and for allowing Americans to vote while staying safely at home during a pandemic. (More people vote when they can vote by mail and Republicans know this.)
You have to go be loud and obnoxious again. Email and fax your reps and tell them to fund the U.S.P.S.
Lets not go the way of the UK with our mail, shall we?
This is the best essay I’ve read on modern wages vs. cost of living vs. inflation. Why are we all struggling even though economists say wages are fine? Oren Cass has done the work. Here you go:
If “our economy” has continued to grow as economists love to say, where has the created wealth gone if not into the pockets of the workers who created it?
Billionaires.
We’ve never suffered such a huge disparity between the richest of the rich and the rest of us. It’s well past time to correct that problem.
Not just billionaires.
We have quite a bit of money being sucked up by the capital-holding class as a whole, and by capital-holding class I mean the people—and companies, and other entities—whose ownership stake in the stuff we need gets leveraged to make what’s available as expensive as possible so as to forcibly suck up more of our money rather than less.
Every item that is only available in the “improved” versions which happen to be more expensive because “you’re getting more” is a reduction in choice being presented as just as fair of a deal as what it replaced, which deliberately excises questions like “is it a good idea to spend this much?” and “can I afford this?” and “do I want all these bells and whistles enough to pay for them?” from the equation. But those are valid questions.
Nobody’s building starter homes these days. Nobody’s building small simple homes on small lots. Nobody’s building economy apartments. It’s all McMansions, “executive homes,” luxury lofts, upscale apartments. Everybody’s selling dream homes and they’re deliberately avoiding the question of whether people can afford their dreams just yet, or whether buying the dream home just now is the prudent financial choice. You aren’t given the choice; it’s made for you—buy an expensive home or rent an expensive apartment or townhome.
It’s like lifestyle creep, but enforced. Home is a need, and the owner class controls the supply so that the need is not for a home but for an expensive home, because it’s that or homelessness and homelessness is difficult, insecure, stigmatized, and criminalized. Health insurance is expensive, healthcare is more expensive, and health insurance in the “affordable” range winds up catching you in between those two with deductibles and dubious coverage. Education is expensive and you need it to not be stuck in poverty and you might get stuck in poverty anyway. And even the “cheap” options, well, aren’t.
The people who own the choices are eliminating the cheaper options to force expenditures on the more expensive ones, and it’s deliberate.
saying “you are a burden on society” is just such a weird framing of priorities
It’s like saying “wow, think how much better gas mileage your car would get if you weren’t sitting in it” or “think how dry that umbrella would be if you weren’t holding it in between you and the rainstorm”.
the things we create? they’re for us. they are meant to carry us. they are meant to protect us. we are meant to hold them up to keep us dry.
why do we even have a society if not to take care of each other?
why do we even have a society if not to take care of each other?
